Sunday, July 10, 2016

Parenting: Serve and Return

The church where I work is being
patient with me and trying a new experiment for summer Sunday school. I have
lessons in bags and families stop by, pick a bag and take it to a room to
complete the activities with their children.

Each bag contains a Bible story and
verse to memorize. Art activities, games, puzzles, and discussion questions
give the families some choices that allow them to custom design the lesson for
their children.

I sit in the entrance area for our
Family Summer Sunday School and check families in and out. During that time I hear
voices coming from the classrooms and what I hear warms my heart.

Curiosity abounds as bags are opened
and Bible stories are read. There is laughter as activities are attempted and
retried. Today one child smiled a mile wide as he told me he loved the finger
traps. Another child kept at the marble paint activity until the blue and red
made purple. Some families finish in 20 minutes and others have to be
gently shooed out at the end of the hour.

My favorite bits of conversation are
something developmental psychologists call "serve and return." It is
the interaction between parent and child. Serve and return begins in infancy
when parents melt in front of their newborns
to instinctively indulge in baby talk. Mom talks to baby and baby responds
encouraging Mom to initiate more conversation. This continues as the child
grows. A toddler asks Dad an obvious question and Dad responds serving a
question of his own. To the casual observer the conversations barely seem
useful, but for the child’s developing brain this type of interaction is
pure gold. It allows them to test new information as they absorb information by learning patterns.

Babies are essentially born into an alien world. They know nothing, cannot speak the language, and are on a steep learning curve to get things figured out. Serve and return is a process that
wires the child's brain creating and organizing important neural pathways that
become the basis for all learning. Each child's brain must figure out its world
and the serve and return process gives essential information allowing sense to
be made of everyday happenings.

In addition to academic
benefits, this process teaches language, social skills, and stress coping
strategies. Furthermore, serve and return builds trust as children learn over
and over again that their parent's response is dependable. The
ability to trust is essential to learning as well as emotional health. There is
a lot happening in this game of verbal tennis.

The best thing about the Family
Summer Sunday School brand of serve and return is that it happens in the
context of faith learning. Through the blessing and power of the Spirit, these
parents are building the brains of their children with the bricks and mortar of
faith.That faith will be a part of all future learning.

That's pretty powerful stuff.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.